


Heading North

by Allothi



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-01
Updated: 2011-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-15 07:05:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allothi/pseuds/Allothi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a kinkmeme prompt, <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/inception_kink/17044.html?thread=34427796#t34427796">here</a>: "For some reason Arthur hitchhikes. Eames picks him up."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heading North

**Author's Note:**

> With immense thanks to wanderlight for deBritishing my English (and correcting my spelling of water skis *headdesk*).

In a stroke of luck, Arthur meets a couple on the ferry to Dover who are headed to Dunstable and agree to give him a ride. He tells them he's hitchhiking for charity, because it works. (He's been told he has a trustworthy face.) He tells them it's a cancer charity because most people approve of cancer, even if some would rather it were pets or endangered penguins.

The couple drop him off at a busy service station off the M1, and he takes an hour off to get something to eat and buy a new novel (historical: he had to give up thrillers and scifi a few years back, after he found himself going over them in red pen) and then looks about for potentially generous people who won't be so generous they try to sponsor him.

He finds a couple of guys, mid twenties, who tell him they're on their way to Leicester, which they probably are, but unfortunately they get invited to a house party in London only a short stretch of motorway later. Heated debate ensues across the cup holder as to whether they really want to end up crashing at someone else's flat on a floor covered in spilt drinks and cheesy wotsits. Apparently they do, and so they drop Arthur off, not at a service station, where there would be plenty of long-distance travellers passing through, but in the middle of Milton Keynes. Most people on the road in Milton Keynes are, Arthur suspects, (1) unlikely to stop for a hitchhiker, and (2) unlikely to be headed further than the local supermarket.

Nevertheless, Milton Keynes is where he is dropped, and in spite of his lucid argumentation to the contrary, his driver and his driver's companion think they're doing him the best favour they could do. Milton Keynes is, they explain, "a city," and is therefore "full of people!"

Arthur, currently armed with a variety of concealed weaponry (there are dangerous people out there on the road, and he prefers to be one of them), counts to ten and reminds himself of why he doesn't kill civilians.

He spends a while by a street lamp at the roadside on the outskirts of Milton Keynes out of sheer stubbornness. He'll probably end up walking to the nearest services. He could get a taxi -- he is, after all, a fabulously wealthy international criminal -- but that would go against the rules he's set for himself, and the rules are at least half of what makes this fun.

He's about to give it up and start walking when a car does, in fact, stop for him. It's a little red VW Golf. The driver winds down his window and shouts, "Where to?" and then sticks his head out, stares at Arthur, and swears.

"I think I'm hallucinating," says Eames.

"Yeah, me too," says Arthur.

"Are you wearing a _hoodie_?"

Arthur agrees that he is. Eames disappears into the car and, presumably, checks his totem. (The familiar weight of Arthur's die in his pocket is not as reassuring as he'd like it to be. Just because he's awake, doesn't mean he isn't going crazy.)

And then Eames leans back out again and shouts, "Hop in!"

"I haven't told you which way I'm going," Arthur says, though he's already hefting up his backpack.

"All right," Eames says amenably. "Which way are you going."

"North." As far north as Arthur can get, in fact. Mostly on the logic that he's been heading north so far -- through Italy, Switzerland, a little corner of Germany, and France -- and so he might as well keep going until he runs into an ocean. Unless he can find a way to hitchhike to Iceland.

"Nice and specific," Eames says. "All right then. Hop in."

*

"Really, a Golf?" Arthur says, after about three minutes of silent driving.

"Why not? Very popular car. Very inconspicuous. Passed all sorts of safety tests, I'd've thought you'd approve of that." Eames grins. "And very nippy in car parks."

"Nippy," Arthur says.

"Good quality in a car."

"I'd always figured you as the James Bond car type."

"Oh. Well, yeah," says Eames. "My other car has water skis." The indicators click as he overtakes someone doing fifty on the inside lane. "But I crashed it into a sperm whale."

"My commiserations."

"I still lie awake thinking about it," Eames says. "By the way," he adds, "you're wearing a hoodie."

"So you've said," Arthur says.

"You're not in deep disguise, on the run from armed governmental and/or criminal organisations are you?" Eames says. "Because I'll still help you out, for a fee, but I like to know whether or not to plan for shootouts at breakfast and so forth."

"Not unless you're incurring them," Arthur says.

"Oh. So-- so _this is how you dress?_ " Eames sounds a complicated mixture of delighted, confused, and worried all over again that he might be hallucinating.

"Not usually. But this makes me look more as though I might be raising money for cancer."

Eames looks hard at Arthur, looks at the road, looks at Arthur, and then thankfully looks at the road again.

"What?" Arthur says.

Eames pauses before he answers, "You're not always the person I first took you to be."

*

They get as far as the edge of Leicester, and then Eames decides it's time to stop for the night and turns off the motorway, winds down a few roads and ends up at a nice-looking, smallish bed and breakfast. Arthur, who spent the last three nights sleeping on benches and on other people's backseats, reminds himself that it's not actually in his rules that he _has_ to do that and follows Eames in to get a room for himself. He starts daydreaming about beds (the way they're soft and stationary and _give_ under your weight, and the way you wake up in them after a peaceful night's sleep and don't ache in numerous places) before he's even got to the reception desk.

Unfortunately, perhaps because it is a nice-looking, smallish bed and breakfast, there is only one room left. Arthur groans. He wants a bed, and, now that he's let himself think about it, he fervently _wants_ a good night's sleep.

Eames shrugs, nonchalant. "Flip for it."

"We'll share," Arthur tells the man at reception, pays him quickly and snatches up the key.

In their room, Eames leans back against the wall and smirks. "You know, darling, if I'd realised you--"

Arthur collapses upon the bed. He falls asleep.

*

 

Arthur wakes in the middle of the night, on top of the covers, with one arm thrown over the large under-the-covers lump that is probably Eames. Arthur removes the arm quickly. He is boiling hot and sweating, which is probably why he is awake, if not because his gun is digging into him in an uncomfortable way. He strips down quickly to T-shirt and boxers, slips under the covers and falls back to sleep.

*

In the morning, Arthur wakes to find that he and Eames are now back to back, their asses touching oddly, most of the covers pulled over to Arthur's side of the bed. Eames mumbles something incoherently when Arthur throws the covers back on top of him, and then shifts onto his back and starfishes out into the space Arthur has left, covers now entangled about him. Arthur leaves him like that and goes off to take a shower.

*

Breakfast is served in a homey room with dark blue patterned wallpaper, heavy wooden tables and happy duck figurines on the sideboard. Eames has porridge and a glass of orange juice. Arthur has fried sausages, fried eggs, fried tomatoes and fried mushrooms. And coffee.

Eames watches him, a strange expression on his face. Arthur starts on the toast that has been put on a metal toast rack between them.

"You eat like a teenager," Eames says.

Arthur shrugs and chews. "I walked about fifteen miles yesterday to get to Calais. And I only got to eat service station food."

"Oh," Eames says. "I see." He appears to weigh his words very carefully before he adds, " _Why?_ "

"Couldn't get dropped off any closer. Sometimes it happens that way," Arthur says. "And service station food is what was available."

"Right," Eames says.

"Coffee?" says Arthur. They've been given a cafetière, from which Arthur pours himself another cup.

"You're not actually hitchhiking for cancer, are you?" Eames says. "Because I would completely fail to understand if you were."

"Nope. Just for fun." Arthur eats his last fried mushroom. "Hey, there's a services near here that looks like it'll be pretty busy. Could you drop me there, if it's not out of your way?"

*

Eames doesn't drop Arthur off at the services.

"Tell you what," Eames says, as they drive past the motorway exit. "Why don't you stick with me for a while. You're heading north, I, as it happens, am heading north, and I could even pretend to be an ordinary British automobilist if you'd like, and make small talk about the football and the weather."

Arthur considers it. His rules include not calling acquaintances for rides, but say nothing on the subject of acquaintances happening upon him and offering a ride of their own accord. Eames is, from one perspective, just another commuter willing to help Arthur out. And if he's honest with himself, he wouldn't mind a break from pretending he's twenty-three and trying to save the world through unconventional travel.

"How far north?" he asks.

"That's for me to know," Eames says.

Arthur reaches a decision. "Okay," he says. "But no small talk."

Eames grins.

*

"Not that it wasn't nice, having family around, there's always someone there to take care of the children or when you're poorly, and it was where I grew up, you know? It was where me and Nige first met, and where we first... Well, and there was the house, and we'd just tiled the bathroom! But to be honest, the moment the offer came through, I thought, _I just can't wait to get out of here_. I just couldn't wait!"

"Hm," Arthur says noncommittally.

"You probably think that's terribly unfeeling," Eames goes on, in his best female-Brummie-working class-housewife impression. "And I know, I know, my mum was _heartbroken_ , but I felt like my life wasn't my own!"

"Actually, I would've changed identities and left the country," Arthur says. "Eames, are you sure she's the kind of person who would pick up a hitchhiker? Female, on her own. And where's she supposed to be driving to, anyway?"

"She thought you looked like an honest person. She's a little naïve that way. And she's going to visit her parents in Birmingham."

"Wouldn't she have taken the M40?"

"Oh, fuck you, you're impressed, you know it," Eames says. "I am a _consummate artist_ and you are _awed by my skill_."

"Hm," Arthur says, because he is, just a little.

*

About half an hour after they pass Leeds, it starts to rain. First gently, tiny drops pattering on the windscreen in soft accompaniment to the radio (Eames has taken a break from playing characters after a strenuous argument with Arthur over whether a Ukrainian mobster would plausibly be driving a VW Golf through England). Then it falls somewhat more heavily, and Eames switches on the windshield wipers. And then, suddenly they're in the middle of the kind of rainstorm Arthur has heard people call biblical.

He can't see more than a few metres ahead. Eames slows the car, rain pounding against the roof, and Arthur switches off the radio -- the reception has turned to shit. They crawl along the motorway in a grey and doleful world.

"So," Eames says, as Arthur stares at the rain. "Hitchhiking."

"This is a ridiculous car," Arthur says.

"It's ordinary," Eames says patiently. "That's the point."

Arthur drums his fingers on the dashboard.

"Is this something you do often?" Eames says. "And by _this_ I mean _hitchhiking_ , not _changing the subject_ or _inflicting moody silence upon your fellow human beings_."

Arthur feels himself smile in spite of himself. "Not often."

"First time?"

"No."

"So when was that?" Eames asks, in voice that says, _talk to me_.

And Arthur's first thought is, _No_. But then he thinks, _Why not?_ It's not such a big deal, after all. (Maybe it's the atmospheric, mood-altering weather conditions. Maybe it's being trapped in a terrible car. Maybe it's that Eames is far too good at that _talk to me_ voice.)

"I hitched to South America after Mal died," Arthur says. "It was--" He shrugs. "I just wanted to be somewhere else." He hadn't wanted to drive, because then he would have had to have thought about _where to_ and he didn't have an answer. "I got a ride, and then another ride, and then another. Crossed the border. It took my mind off things." He'd got pretty far through Argentina before he finally checked his mail, in a pay-per-minute net cafe, and found out that Cobb was wanted and on the run. "It was easy." He shrugs again.

The rain is still falling thickly, Eames still driving slowly and carefully, his eyes fixed on the road. But he takes a second to glance at Arthur. "So who died this time?"

"No one," Arthur says honestly. "I just wanted a break."

*

Eames gets tired of driving in the rain and pulls into a service station for lunch. Arthur gets out of the car and puts up his umbrella. Eames, still in the car, swears at him.

Arthur walks into the services (packed, noisy and humid), shakes out his umbrella and gets in line at Starbucks. Eames joins him a couple of minutes later, looking like a drunk who's fallen in a river. His hair is plastered to his forehead and his cheeks are flushed. He swears at Arthur again.

"There're children around," Arthur tells him.

"Oh, as if you have such high moral standards. What kind of cancer was it you're collecting for again?"

"Pancreatic," Arthur says automatically. "And I thought you might want to at least get a coffee before you get thrown out for corrupting the young."

"Huh," Eames scoffs. "Most five year-olds these days know more obscenities than either of us."

"Quite probably," Arthur admits. "But their parents _don't_."

"Poor, innocent parents. Poor things." Eames sighs theatrically. "Where the fuck are we going to sit?"

*

They end up leaning against the wall outside M&S Simply Food, near the main entryway to the building, drinking their coffee and eating sandwiches. Eames is still dripping wet, and Arthur find that he has to work not to watch the way drops of water occasionally drip from Eames' hair and down his face.

"Real food this evening," Eames says. "For my sake, if not for yours."

Arthur thinks about that. "Where _are_ you headed?" he asks.

Eames laughs. "Well. In actual fact, I was headed down to Milton Keynes Tesco. But you seemed more interesting."

Arthur turns and looks at Eames, and Eames glances to the side at Arthur and then returns his attention to his sandwich. His expression looks normal, so far as Arthur can tell: not blank but not particularly emotional either. Mildly amused, in the way that Eames tends to look mildly amused by life. Maybe a little tense, but that could be from driving.

"That's pretty odd behaviour," Arthur tells him.

"You'd be the expert," Eames says, and Arthur thinks about protesting, but he supposes most international mind criminals generally don't pose as charity hitchhikers, which makes it behaviour that might look odd from an outside perspective.

"I'm between jobs," Eames says. "I was bored and curious." He grins. "And you honestly are more interesting than Tesco."

Arthur turns his head back to face ahead and watches a young family coming in from the rain. There's a little girl in a little red rain hat who reminds him of Phillipa, back when she was only three or four, when James was newly born. Arthur used to visit often. He liked being around a functioning family. He supposes they were never what he thought they were, but he thinks, for a few years or so there, they still had it pretty good.

The thought strikes him suddenly that he and Eames have given away far too much about themselves this past half day; although when he thinks about it, he can't put his finger on much. It's always weird being around someone mundanely like this when you're used to only seeing them on the job. Things get shifted around.

"Though perhaps not quite as interesting as Waitrose," Eames says.

"Useful to know," Arthur says and drinks his coffee.

*

"Wait, so you live in Milton Keynes?" Arthur says, a while later.

"Well," Eames says, "not really."

"But--"

"I have a flat there. And no, it's not a particularly charming location. But it's about the last place you'd think to look for me."

Arthur supposes that this is true.

Eames throws out the waste from his lunch and says, "Looks like the rain's easing up."

Arthur nods. "Let me get my bag from the car. There's plenty of people here I can get a ride from."

"Right," Eames says. "Right ho."

*

They pause outside Eames' car, getting wet.

"Exactly how far north are you going?" Eames says.

"I don't know," Arthur says. But he feels like he wants to give Eames the name of somewhere, at least, so he adds, "Maybe the Orkneys."

"Never been." Eames opens the passenger door and gets out Arthur's backpack. He presents it to Arthur with a slight flourish. "Hear it's nice, though."

"Yeah," Arthur says.

"You might have trouble finding anyone who can drive you across that bit of sea, of course."

"Not really. I have it on good authority that they make cars with water skis these days."

Eames shakes his head, expression blurred through the slowing rain. "Never thought I'd hear you call me good authority."

"The idea does take a lot of imagination," Arthur says. And, briefly, he thinks that's it. He'll walk back into the service station and start looking for his next ride. Eames will drive back to Milton Keynes. Perhaps they'll see each other on a job six months from now, and Eames will jibe Arthur about Arthur's strange vacations, and Arthur will ask after Eames' James Bond car and his glamorous not-quite-London apartment, and that will be that. Possibly. (Arthur has always wanted the past to be more neat and closed off than it actually is.)

"I might head up there myself, you know," Eames says. "To the Orkneys." He walks round to the driver's door. "Nothing better to do with my time, after all."

And Arthur's too good at split-second decisions not to make this one. "Okay," he says. "I'll see you there."

*

As expected, it doesn't take Arthur long to find someone who'll give him a ride. He has good luck for most of the rest of the day, and is in Edinburgh by the middle of the evening. Then he meets a middle-aged husband and wife who assure him they're going to Aberdeen; he falls asleep on their back seat and wakes up in Dumfries. The couple are arguing about whose fault it is they don't have a SatNav. The time is 03:22.

Arthur makes a concerted effort at getting back to sleep. The male of the couple shouts something about miserliness. The female shouts something about driving into a lake. Their voices are harsh and hurt and angry. Arthur gets out of the car, omits to thank them for the ride, and starts walking.

After about half an hour trying to walk along the A701 through empty countryside in the dark (to the sound of occasional nocturnal mooing), Arthur has a change of plan, turns around, and walks back the way he came and into Dumfries station, where he grabs a few hours sleep on a bench.

In the morning, after breakfast and use of the men's toilets to clean up as best he can, Arthur spends a few minutes seriously thinking about getting a train the rest of the way. And then he heads out to try to work out where the best place to hitch a ride would be.

*

It takes him another few days to get to the Orkneys. The further north he gets, the fewer people there are passing through and the fewer good places to ask for a ride. He spends a lot of time standing at roadsides with his thumb in the air.

He gets the ferry from Gill's Bay and spends the journey on deck, at the railings, half-listening to a group of women discussing whether or not they can see seals in the water. Arthur watches the waves and tries to make out eddies in the tide.

The wind is brisk, both on ship and when Arthur disembarks at St Margaret's Hope. It's mid-afternoon, and the sun is pale and bright. He wanders into the village and finds a couple of tourists willing to give him a ride to Kirkwall, where he gets a room in a hotel for the week and immediately makes use of the shower. He spends the rest of the day wandering, getting to know the place, and getting a meal at another hotel.

He finds Eames at a pub, making small (-ish) talk with a local about renewable energy over a couple of pints. Arthur buys himself a scotch and sits down next to Eames, who has already noticed him.

"Hey," Arthur says.

"Good journey?" says Eames.

"Not bad," Arthur says, and lets Eames get back to the relative merits of offshore wind farms.

"Buy you another drink?" Arthur says, when Eames' fellow conversationalist has left them.

Eames leans back and smiles broadly, an ironic glint in his eyes. "Arthur," he says, "my drink is still half full." He gestures to his glass on the table before them, which looks giantlike next to Arthur's (more depleted) shot of scotch, and is, if anything, nearer three-quarters full than half.

"Must've missed that," Arthur says.

*

They turn out to be staying at the same hotel. They go to Eames' room because it's marginally nearer. They drink the complimentary tea and Arthur thinks about the fact that here he is, in Eames' hotel room, almost certainly about to have sex with him. He could ask himself how this happened but he knows that there's never a satisfying answer to that kind of question. This is happening because it's what he wants. This is happening because it just is.

They have sex.

Eames sucks Arthur off on his knees, Arthur pressed back against the only good stretch of bare wall, between the doorways to the en suite and the corridor. Every so often, Arthur's upper arm knocks against the light switch and turns it off or on. Arthur rambles to Eames, filters not entirely operational, that it's good, that it's not quite, that Eames' last -- person -- must have been a crazy bastard, not like that, oh god, like _that_ , not like-- ( _god, fuck,_ Eames _, fuck, ffuuck_ ). Eames draws back and laughs when Arthur comes, inexplicable, untranslatable, and Arthur feels angry, humiliated, sexed and blissed out. He's transfixed by the beautiful, blank blackness of Eames' swollen pupils as Eames looks up at him, lips very red.

Arthur tries to pull him up, kiss him and shove him towards the bed all at once. Eames turns out to be a hair-puller, and Arthur forgets to pretend to hate that.

*

He wakes briefly, later, in the small hours of the morning, the light still on, as it must have been when they finished, and two unfinished mugs of tea sitting side by side on the low table next to the television. He and Eames are sleeping back to back again, and this time Eames has most of the covers. Arthur looks at his clothes, scattered across the floor. He imagines getting dressed, going back to his own room (three doors down). He switches the light off and goes back to sleep.

*

The hotel doesn't offer breakfast in bed, but Eames manages to convince someone. As they eat, they end up talking about work. Arthur has heard about a job in Mumbai that might be worth looking into. Eames has heard something about research in Israel that might or might not be a game-changer. They've both heard about a job gone wrong last month, in London, with a team experienced enough that it's unexpected. They compare notes and theories.

"In fact I thought that might be why you were here," Eames says.

Arthur shakes his head, chewing on his second piece of toast. "It isn't."

"No, well, this would be quite elaborate cover, even for you," Eames says.

"Dumfries at past three in the morning would not have been worth it," Arthur agrees. On which Eames raises his brows and somehow gets Arthur telling him about some of his less pleasant experiences in hitchhiking.

"You know," Eames says, at the end of the story of the Italian woman who left Arthur half way up a mountain in the Alps, "as far as I can work out, this is the first break you've taken since Cobb went on the run. And yet _this_ is how you choose to spend it?"

Arthur shrugs. "I just like it," he says. He just does.

"I suppose you do," Eames says.

*

"So where're you headed next?" Eames asks, that afternoon, looking at the Victorian graffiti on the Dwarfie Stane on Hoy.

"I don't know," Arthur says. "I thought I'd stay here for a while. Seems like a good place to do nothing."

Eames laughs softly and wanders closer to the Stane.

"You?" Arthur asks.

Eames looks back at him. "Oh, _nothing_ sounds good to me," he says.

Arthur thinks about it, brisk wind pricking against his cheeks, and thinks, after this week, he'll probably get back to work again. He feels like it's time.

He wonders if Eames will take that job in Mumbai.


End file.
